Rage
by Archemios
Summary: For one of countless souls forced to serve in penal legions, it is more than an emotion.


Fear.

It's the only word that can describe his emotions. Not as overpowering as terror; not as underwhelming as anxiety. It's a primal sensation rooted in biology - a gift from his rodent ancestors. A gift meant to ensure survival.

Here, in the confines of a Gorgon transport, fear is a liability. It's a palpable sensation; he can see it etched into the gaunt faces of his fellow prisoners. Their hooded eyes flit all around the armoured hull, looking for some sort of escape. Their breathing is ragged beneath their respirators. The very air is alive with the tension of the moment. And the smell, by the Golden Throne, is a distasteful mix of fyceline and sweat that even respirators can't filter out.

Above them, like soulless hawks, roost a cotingent of arbiters and commissars, all solemn judgement wrapped in black coats and carapace. A single priest is preaching a sermon about redemption in the eyes of the God-Emperor, but there is little doubt nobody is listening.

Jalek Kharsen certainly isn't. He is too afraid to hear the honeyed words of self-sacrifice - too calloused from the mundane cruelty of a penal legion to be touched by them, even if he could hear them. The sounds of incoming fire suddenly drown out the voices. The whistling and detonation of shells, the sound of metal hail striking the massive prow of the Gorgon. A lucky chunk of shrapnel catches a commissar through the back of the head. He drops, surprise etched on his face, crumpling over an unlucky penal legionary below.

Kharsen can feel the shifting gears of the massive transport. It is building up speed for its inevitable impact through a fortified wall. None of the prisoners have been briefed over their enemy. Kharsen has survived three tours against various xenos horrors, from the eldar to the orks. He prays that they have been called in to put down some misguided rebellion, that he can face a normal man instead of some alien monster.

With a juddering impact that throws the neophyte legionaries off their feet, the Gorgon breaks through a wall. Rubble and dust rain over the sides of the transport, none of it large enough to do harm. The massive door rolls down with a pneumatic hiss and the commissars begin firing shots into the sky, yelling curses to muster the prisoners forward. Already, bullets are ricocheting off the interior and finding marks in the bewildered prisoners.

Kharsen rushes forward with the mass, catching his first glimpse of the enemy. He sighs out a breath he had been unwittingly holding; the enemy is comprised of men and women in civilian clothing. They wield autoguns and crude las-muskets with little to no training, betraying their inexperience. Kharsen is nearly moved to tears by relief. Finally, a human foe!

Then Kharsen notices the sudden halt of his comrades, the mad push in the opposite direction. The commissars are firing into retreating legionaries, but there are too many to adequetly punish. Over the heads of friend and foe alike, Kharsen sees what they are fleeing from and all hope flees his body.

The hulking figure bound in ceramite armour towers over his mortal prey. He is bearing down on them with a grace that defies reason.

'A...' Kharsen stutters, unwilling to voice the word, 'Astartes.'

This is not one of the noble sons of the Primarchs, not the angels of death revered as servants of the Emperor. This is nothing like the somber, righteous images Kharsen had been taught to respect and obey. This is a craven, fallen idol - an act of sacrilige that at once angers and terrifies. Its armour is alight with crude runes and glyphs that strain the eye. In its hand, roaring like a prodded ursine, is an axe half as long as Kharsen is tall, spitting black smoke while churning its metal teeth.

One symbol repeats itself over the crimson armor, marked in blood red or shining brass. It is a skull, crude and effective, all angles and lines. Kharsen feels his fear turn to panic as he begins following the press of bodies around him. He turns to see the arbiters adjusting dials on their vox-sets and inhales sharply. He has seen this before.

Suddenly his nostrils fill with the sickly-sweet stench of frenzon as his respirator pumps in the drug. Around him he sees other legionaries stop in their tracks, shuddering under the weight of the sudden chemical change in their minds. Kharsen no longer feels despair. The energy of his panic swings into the righteous fury of bloodlust. The black of the commissars and arbiters is a blur, but some primeval part of the legionaries' minds knows not to strike against them.

There is a horrifying roar filling the air. Kharsen scarcely realises that it is him and his fellow prisoners screaming themselves hoarse in their fervor. They are throwing themselves at their foe, now completely uncaring of the cost. The cultists die in droves, throats slit, heads caved in, guts spilled. The prison-soldiers forget how to pull the trigger, using their lasguns as little more than clubs.

Kharsen is lost to the drug. He sees everything in a red tinge, if at all. A single figure stands out: the Astartes. Kharsen must kill him, somehow. He searches the ground for a suitable weapon, finding only firearms and makeshift clubs. Looking around him, he finds it - the perfect weapon with which to kill a space marine. It is being ripped from the corpse of a commissar, a power fist.

Kharsen charges at the cultists fighting over the trophy. They look up, partly-afraid, partly-eager. Nobody uses their firearms. Kharsen immediately runs one cultist through with his bayonet, gutting him as he rips the lasgun free. A female cultist brings down her arm, a sharpened tonfa of scrap metal threatening to decapitate the penal legionary. Kharsen places the lasgun between him and the blade, barely registering the whine of its power cell being cracked. Twisting the blade aside, Kharsen rams the butt of his weapon into the cultist's face, shattering her nose and sending her on her back. Dispatching her with several savage hits to the face, Kharsen moves onto the final cultist.

The cultist is a man - a forge worker, by the look of his muscles and spark-burned skin. He cocks his head sideways in curiosity, his expression hidden behind a forge mask. The power fist sits on the cultist's hand, already glowing with energy. Kharsen charges in, unafraid. It is a one-sided fight. The cultist swings wide, allowing Kharsen to get inside his guard. The cultist realizes his error too late as the bayonet of Kharsen's lasgun pierces his throat and buries itself in his spine.

Kharsen doesn't wait for the body to fall before trying to pry the energised gauntlet off of his hand. Ignoring the burns and cuts he receives for his efforts, the legionary manages to secure the weapon as his own. Then his zeal begins to die and his exhausted limbs feel like lead. Kharsen holds himself up with the last of his energy, watching as the cultists slaughter the arbiters and commissars.

Within minutes the only survivors are the legionaries who surrendered willingly - and Kharsen, too weary to fight on. They have been cut off from the frenzon, and it feels like being cut off from life.

The ground trembles with the footfalls of the approaching Astartes. Kharsen forces himself to look up, up into the soulless emerald optics of his killer. He manages to stand straight while his comrades kneel. The Astartes stops before him, shaking with barely-contained energy. His gauntlets fumble for his helmet seals, practically ripping his pronged helmet from his head. A face of scar tissue, muscle spasms, and checked aggression bears down on him.

Then Kharsen hears something he had never heard in all his time killing for the Imperium.

'You...' the words are a struggle for the superhuman warrior, 'fight well.'

The compliment nearly causes Kharsen to fall. They are, perhaps, the last words he had ever expected to hear from a daemon-warped traitor marine.

'These... _cowards_...' the Astartes gestures towards the other legionaries, '...their deaths are beneath me.'

'Beneath you?' Kharsen asks through ragged breaths. He had imagined a kill-happy traitor marine would not shy from slaughter of any kind.

'A warrior... of my calibre... To kill the unarmed... It is dishonorable.' the Astartes explains, his speech becoming less slurred, 'But Khorne, our Father... demands blood.'

The warrior lets out a growl as he prods a genhanced finger into Kharsen's chest.

'You... kill them.' he says, 'Prove yourself... to the Blood God. Prove yourself deserving... of the Eightscarred.'

'I can't.' Kharsen begins, but his reasoning surprises him, 'I am too tired.'

There is a horrible sound, a wet ripping noise like the growling of some massive cat. Kharsen realizes it is an approximation of a laugh from the space marine.

'Use your hate.' he says, a moment of clarity shining in his half-crazed eyes, 'Let your anger... drive you.'

Kharsen doesn't realize he is moving until he has turned around to face the few legionaries left. He feels a sudden fury welling up in him. Years of discipline, of walking beneath the judging eyes of Imperial society suddenly makes him seethe. The totalitarian rule of a distant and unloving Emperor. The loneliness in an overcrowded galaxy. The unfairness of everything he had been raised to revere. With a primal scream tearing out of his throat, Kharsen thrusts the gauntlet through the first terrified legionary. Words spill from his lips, gifted to him during the height of his euphoric rage.

'Blood..' they seem as holy writ, long forgotten yet always know, 'for the Blood God!'

He tears the power fist out of his victim's chest, finding a knife and sawing away at the neck. He separates the head from the body with sickening efficiency, holding it aloft for weeping legionaries and cheering cultists alike. Another psalm of sweet enlightenment leaves his lips.

'Skulls for the Skull Throne!'

In all his years, Kharsen has never felt more alive as the gore slicks down his arms. He is lost to a new and wonderful emotion, one that he had surpressed under his dreary life under Imperial rule. He is weeping with joy as he stares into the lifeless, terrified gaze of the severed head in his energised fist.

Rage.


End file.
